The second screen is a central part of appointment TV. Moments like timeouts or even ads become a time for scrolling on social platforms.

During the Super Bowl, most brands focus on Twitter, but in 2020 GenZ shifted en masse to TikTok. Chipotle took advantage by dropping a new piece of TikTok content every time a timeout was called on the field.

The integration brought together traditional media’s biggest stage and emerging media's hottest new platform.

Chipotle drove business results by reaching a Superbowl-sized audience of 95M viewers on TikTok and nearly doubling Chipotle’s YOY delivery sales.

Superbowl Sunday is one of the biggest days of the year for food delivery. It’s also one of the most crowded days for traditional advertising.

So to keep Chipotle top of mind (and top of delivery cart) during the Big Game, we launched a non-traditional Super Bowl campaign on Gen Z’s favorite app: TikTok.

Knowing that over 75% of Super Bowl viewers engaged with social media during the game in 2019, we wanted to take over the second screen. Our goal: to drive online and in-app sales on game day and get people talking about Chipotle delivery on social.

We worked with TikTok to secure 12 established influencers with a combined following of more than 95M to create their own unique game-day delivery videos, each tailor-made for their audience and set to the platform’s #1 trending track, Justin Bieber’s “Yummy.”

Then, every time a timeout was called on TV, a new creator would post their video to TikTok. We called it #TikTokTimeout.

To ground our idea, we looked at a number of data-driven insights. We knew that the second screen would play a big role in the Super Bowl viewing experience. We also knew that the game day food delivery trend was on the rise. Our target demographic (Gen Z) was spending more time than ever on TikTok. By leveraging both the platform and its #1 trending song, we were able to expand our campaign’s reach by +200M.

Our target audience was 18-34 year-olds. In 2019, this demographic was responsible for the most growth of Chipotle’s delivery business, and the most likely to be engaging on multiple screens during televised events.

To select our influencers, we looked to TikTok native creators that had an authentic affinity for Chipotle and high engagement rates across their organic channels.

By giving them creative control of their video concepts, we not only saw high viewership but high engagement and positive sentiment across posts – primarily because the videos didn’t feel like #ads.

By using Justin Bieber’s viral track, we were able to also reach his audience, thanks to multiple unpaid posts supporting the campaign from his own social accounts.

In the days leading up to the Super Bowl, Chipotle alerted the press about TikTok Timeout to build buzz ahead of the game.

On game day, we established a special social team that was responsible for communicating with each of our 12 influencers in real-time as timeouts were called on screen. This team also engaged with each of the influencer’s TikTok videos from Chipotle’s own TikTok account and communicated with fans in the comments, which gave us hundreds of opportunities to push delivery via one-to-one communication on social.

Additionally, we promoted the activation across Instagram and Twitter, driving our fans to TikTok. Justin Bieber also organically posted to both his Instagram (+140M) and Twitter (+112M), unpaid.

TikTok Timeout was an instant success for Chipotle. Over the course of the Super Bowl game, our 12 creators dropped unique spots reaching 95M+ followers and driving over 10M engagements.

As a result, Chipotle nearly doubled its annual SuperBowl Sunday delivery sales. Justin Bieber even organically shared the campaign across his social channels, reaching his 250M+ fans.

All this without spending a single dollar on traditional advertising.